nuclear weapondevice designed to release energy in an explosive manner as a result of nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or a combination of the two processes. Fission weapons are commonly referred to as atomic bombs. Fusion weapons are also referred to as thermonuclear bombs or, more commonly, hydrogen bombs; they are usually defined as nuclear weapons in which at least a portion of the energy is released by nuclear fusion.

Nuclear weapons produce enormous explosive energy. Their significance may best be appreciated by the coining of the words kiloton (1,000 tons) and megaton (1,000,000 tons) to describe their blast energy in equivalent weights of the conventional chemical explosive TNT. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, containing only about 64 kg (140 pounds) of highly enriched uranium, released energy equaling about 15 kilotons of chemical explosive. That blast immediately produced a strong shock wave, enormous amounts of heat, and lethal ionizing radiation. Convection currents created by the explosion drew dust and other debris into the air, creating the mushroom-shaped cloud that has since become the virtual signature of a nuclear explosion. In addition, radioactive debris was carried by winds high into the atmosphere, later to settle to Earth as radioactive fallout. The enormous toll in destruction, death, injury, and sickness produced by the explosions at Hiroshima and, three days later, at Nagasaki was on a scale never before produced by any single weapon. In the decades since 1945, even as many countries have developed nuclear weapons of far greater strength than those used against the Japanese cities, concerns about the dreadful effects of such weapons have driven governments to negotiate arms control agreements such as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968. Among military strategists and planners, the very presence of these weapons of unparalleled destructive power has created a distinct discipline, with its own internal logic and set of doctrines, known as nuclear strategy.

The first nuclear weapons were bombs delivered by aircraft. Later, warheads were developed for strategic ballistic missiles, which have become by far the most important nuclear weapons. Smaller tactical nuclear weapons have also been developed, including ones for artillery projectiles, land mines, antisubmarine depth charges, torpedoes, and shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles.

By far the greatest force driving the development of nuclear weapons after World War II (though not by any means the only force) was the Cold War confrontation that pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its satellite states. During this period, which lasted roughly from 1945 to 1991, the American stockpile of nuclear weapons reached its peak in 1967, with more than 32,000 warheads of 30 different types. During the 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many types of tactical and strategic weapons were retired and dismantled to comply with arms control negotiations, such as the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, or as unilateral initiatives. By the turn of the 21st century, the United States had approximately 10,000 warheads of nine types, including two types of bombs, three types for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), two types for submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and two types for cruise missiles. Some types existed in several modifications.

The Soviet nuclear stockpile reached its peak of about 33,000 operational warheads in 1988, with an additional 10,000 previously deployed warheads that had been retired but had not been taken apart. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia accelerated its warhead dismantlement program, but the status of many of its estimated 15,000 warheads remained unclear. Given limited Russian resources and lack of legitimate military missions, probably no more than one-third to one-half of its warheads were serviceable and maintained enough to be deployed. A global security concern is the safety of Russia’s intact warheads and the security of nuclear materials removed from dismantled warheads.

Throughout the 1990s the arsenals of the United Kingdom, France, and China also underwent significant change and consolidation. Britain eliminated its land-based army, tactical naval, and air nuclear missions, keeping just some 200 warheads for its ballistic missile submarine fleet. Meanwhile, France reduced the number of its warheads to about 350, eliminating several types of nuclear weapon systems. The Chinese stockpile remained fairly steady during the 1990s and the start of the 21st century at about 200 warheads. Israel maintains an undeclared nuclear stockpile of nearly 100 warheads, but any developments are highly secret. India is estimated to have about 50 assembled warheads and Pakistan about 60, though both countries, rivals in the incipient arms race on the Indian subcontinent, are thought to be increasing their stockpiles. North Korea, which joined the nuclear club in 2006, may have as many as 10 warheads, though it is not clear that any of these is operational.

Principles of atomic (fission) weapons

The fission process

When bombarded by neutrons, certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium (and some other heavier elements) will split into atoms of lighter elements, a process known as nuclear fission. In addition to this formation of lighter atoms, on average between 2.5 and 3 free neutrons are emitted in the fission process, along with considerable energy. As a rule of thumb, the complete fission of 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of uranium or plutonium produces about 17.5 kilotons of TNT-equivalent explosive energy.

In an atomic bomb or nuclear reactor, first a small number of neutrons are given enough energy to collide with some fissionable nuclei, which in turn produce additional free neutrons. A portion of these neutrons are captured by nuclei that do not fission; others escape the material without being captured; and the remainder cause further fissions. Many heavy atomic nuclei are capable of fissioning, but only a fraction of these are fissile—that is, fissionable not only by fast (highly energetic) neutrons but also by slow neutrons. The continuing process whereby neutrons emitted by fissioning nuclei induce fissions in other fissile or fissionable nuclei is called a fission chain reaction. If the number of fissions in one generation is equal to the number of neutrons in the preceding generation, the system is said to be critical; if the number is greater than one, it is supercritical; and if it is less than one, it is subcritical. In the case of a nuclear reactor, the number of fissionable nuclei available in each generation is carefully controlled to prevent a “runaway” chain reaction. In the case of an atomic bomb, however, a very rapid growth in the number of fissions is sought.

Fission weapons are normally made with materials having high concentrations of the fissile isotopes uranium-235, plutonium-239, or some combination of these; however, some explosive devices using high concentrations of uranium-233 also have been constructed and tested.

The primary natural isotopes of uranium are uranium-235 (0.7 percent), which is fissile, and uranium-238 (99.3 percent), which is fissionable but not fissile. In nature, plutonium exists only in minute concentrations, so the fissile isotope plutonium-239 is made artificially in nuclear reactors from uranium-238. (See uranium processing.) In order to make an explosion, fission weapons do not require uranium or plutonium that is pure in the isotopes uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Most of the uranium used in current nuclear weapons is approximately 93.5 percent enriched uranium-235. Nuclear weapons typically contain 93 percent or more plutonium-239, less than 7 percent plutonium-240, and very small quantities of other plutonium isotopes. Plutonium-240, a by-product of plutonium production, has several undesirable characteristics, including a larger critical mass (that is, the mass required to generate a chain reaction), greater radiation exposure to workers (relative to plutonium-239), and, for some weapon designs, a high rate of spontaneous fission that can cause a chain reaction to initiate prematurely, resulting in a smaller yield. Consequently, in reactors used for the production of weapons-grade plutonium-239, the period of time that the uranium-238 is left in the reactor is restricted in order to limit the buildup of plutonium-240 to about 6 percent.

Critical mass and the fissile core

As is indicated above, the minimum mass of fissile material necessary to sustain a chain reaction is called the critical mass. This quantity depends on the type, density, and shape of the fissile material and the degree to which surrounding materials reflect neutrons back into the fissile core. A mass that is less than the critical amount is said to be subcritical, while a mass greater than the critical amount is referred to as supercritical.

A sphere has the largest volume-to-surface ratio of any solid. Thus, a spherical fissile core has the fewest escaping neutrons per unit of material, and this compact shape results in the smallest critical mass, all else being equal. The critical mass of a bare sphere of uranium-235 at normal density is approximately 47 kg (104 pounds); for plutonium-239, critical mass is approximately 10 kg (22 pounds). The critical mass can be lowered in several ways, the most common being a surrounding shell of some other material that reflects some of the escaping neutrons back into the fissile core. Practical reflectors can reduce the critical mass by a factor of two or three, so that about 15 kg (33 pounds) of uranium-235 and about 5 to 10 kg (11 to 22 pounds) of either plutonium-239 or uranium-233 at normal density can be made critical. The critical mass can also be lowered by compressing the fissile core, because at higher densities emitted neutrons are more likely to strike a fissionable nucleus before escaping.

Gun assembly, implosion, and boosting

In order to produce a nuclear explosion, subcritical masses of fissionable material must be rapidly assembled into a supercritical configuration. The simplest weapon design is the pure fission gun-assembly device, in which an explosive propellant is used to fire one subcritical mass down a “gun barrel” into another subcritical mass. Plutonium cannot be used as the fissile material in a gun-assembly device, because the speed of assembly in this device is too slow to preclude the high probability that a chain reaction will “pre-initiate” by spontaneous neutron emission, thereby generating an explosive yield of only a few tens of tons. Therefore, gun-assembly weapons are made with highly enriched uranium, typically more than 80 percent uranium-235.

The other major assembly method is implosion, in which a subcritical mass of fissile material is compressed by a chemical high explosive into a denser critical mass. The fissile material is typically plutonium or highly enriched uranium or a composite of the two. In the simplest design, a spherical fissile core is surrounded by a reflector (also known as a tamper), which in turn is surrounded by the chemical high explosive. Other geometries are used where the diameter of the device must be kept small—to fit, for example, in an artillery shell or missile warhead—or where higher yields are desired. To obtain a given yield, considerably less fissile material is needed for an implosion weapon than for a gun-assembly device. An implosion fission weapon with an explosive yield of one kiloton can be constructed with as little as 1 to 2 kg (2.2 to 4.4 pounds) of plutonium or with about 5 to 10 kg (11 to 22 pounds) of highly enriched uranium.

Refinements to the basic implosion design came first through Operation Sandstone, an American series of tests conducted in the spring of 1948. Three tests used implosion designs of a second generation, which incorporated composite and levitated cores. The composite core consisted of concentric shells of both uranium-235 and plutonium-239, permitting more efficient use of these fissile materials. Higher compression of the fissile material was achieved by levitating the core—that is, introducing an air gap into the weapon in order to obtain a higher yield for the same amount of fissile material.

American tests during Operation Ranger in early 1951 included implosion devices with cores containing a fraction of a critical mass—a concept originated in 1944 during the Manhattan Project. Unlike the original Fat Man design, these “fractional crit” weapons relied on compressing the fissile core to a higher density in order to achieve a supercritical mass, thereby achieving appreciable yields with less material.

Another technique for enhancing the yield of a fission explosion is called boosting. Boosting refers to a process whereby fusion reactions are used as a source of neutrons for inducing fissions at a much higher rate than could be achieved with neutrons from fission chain reactions alone. American physicist Edward Teller invented the concept by the middle of 1943. By incorporating deuterium and tritium into the core of the fissile material, a higher yield is obtained from a given quantity of fissile material—or, alternatively, the same yield is achieved with a smaller amount. The fourth American test of Operation Greenhouse, on May 24, 1951, was the first proof test of a booster design. In subsequent decades approximately 90 percent of nuclear weapons in the American stockpile relied on boosting.

Principles of thermonuclear (fusion) weapons

The fusion process

Nuclear fusion is the joining (or fusing) of the nuclei of two atoms to form a single heavier atom. At extremely high temperatures—in the range of tens of millions of degrees—the nuclei of isotopes of hydrogen (and some other light elements) can readily combine to form heavier elements and in the process release considerable energy—hence the term hydrogen bomb. At these temperatures, the kinetic energy of the nuclei (the energy of their motion) is sufficient to overcome the long-range electrostatic repulsive force between them, such that the nuclei can get close enough together for the shorter-range strong force to attract and fuse the nuclei—hence the term thermonuclear. In thermonuclear weapons, the required temperatures and density of the fusion materials are achieved with a fission explosion.

Deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, provide ideal interacting nuclei for the fusion process. Two atoms of deuterium, each with one proton and one neutron, or tritium, with one proton and two neutrons, combine during the fusion process to form a heavier helium nucleus, which has two protons and either one or two neutrons. Tritium is radioactive and has a half-life of 12.32 years. The principal thermonuclear material in most thermonuclear weapons is lithium-6 deuteride, a solid chemical compound that at normal temperatures does not undergo radioactive decay. In this case, the tritium is produced in the weapon itself by neutron bombardment of the lithium-6 isotope during the course of the fusion reaction. In thermonuclear weapons, the fusion material can be incorporated directly in (or proximate to) the fissile core—for example, in the boosted fission device—or external to the fissile core, or both.

Basic two-stage design

A typical thermonuclear warhead may be constructed according to a two-stage design, featuring a fission or boosted-fission primary (also called the trigger) and a physically separate component called the secondary. Both primary and secondary are contained within an outer metal case. Radiation from the fission explosion of the primary is contained and used to transfer energy to compress and ignite the secondary. Some of the initial radiation from the primary explosion is absorbed by the inner surface of the case, which is made of a high-density material such as uranium. Radiation absorption heats the inner surface of the case, turning it into an opaque boundary of hot electrons and ions. Subsequent radiation from the primary is largely confined between this boundary and the outer surface of the secondary capsule. Initial, reflected, and re-irradiated radiation trapped within this cavity is absorbed by lower-density material within the cavity, converting it into a hot plasma of electrons and ion particles that continue to absorb energy from the confined radiation. The total pressure in the cavity—the sum of the contribution from the very energetic particles and the generally smaller contribution from the radiation—is applied to the secondary capsule’s heavy metal outer shell (called a pusher), thereby compressing the secondary.

Typically, contained within the pusher is some fusion material, such as lithium-6 deuteride, surrounding a “spark plug” of explosive fissionable material (generally uranium-235) at the centre. With the fission primary generating an explosive yield in the kiloton range, compression of the secondary is much greater than can be achieved using chemical high explosives. Compression of the spark plug results in a fission explosion that creates temperatures comparable to those of the Sun and a copious supply of neutrons for fusion of the surrounding, and now compressed, thermonuclear materials. Thus, the fission and fusion processes that take place in the secondary are generally much more efficient than those that take place in the primary.

In an efficient, modern two-stage device—such as a long-range ballistic missile warhead—the primary is boosted in order to conserve on volume and weight. Boosted primaries in modern thermonuclear weapons contain about 3 to 4 kg (6.6 to 8.8 pounds) of plutonium, while less-sophisticated designs may use double that amount or more. The secondary typically contains a composite of fusion and fissile materials carefully tailored to maximize the yield-to-weight or yield-to-volume ratio of the warhead, although it is possible to construct secondaries from purely fissile or fusion materials.

Enhanced designs

Historically, some very high-yield thermonuclear weapons had a third, or tertiary, stage. In theory, the radiation from the tertiary can be contained and used to transfer energy to compress and ignite a fourth stage, and so on. There is no theoretical limit to the number of stages that might be used and, consequently, no theoretical limit to the size and yield of a thermonuclear weapon. However, there is a practical limit because of size and weight limitations imposed by the requirement that the weapon be deliverable.

Uranium-238 and thorium-232 (and some other fissionable materials) cannot maintain a self-sustaining fission explosion, but these isotopes can be made to fission by an externally maintained supply of fast neutrons from fission or fusion reactions. Thus, the yield of a nuclear weapon can be increased by surrounding the device with uranium-238, in the form of either natural or depleted uranium, or with thorium-232, in the form of natural thorium. This approach is particularly advantageous in a thermonuclear weapon in which uranium-238 or thorium-232 in the outer shell of the secondary capsule is used to absorb an abundance of fast neutrons from fusion reactions produced within the secondary. The explosive yields of some weapon designs have been further increased by the substitution of highly enriched uranium-235 for uranium-238 in the secondary.

In general, the energy released in the explosion of a high-yield thermonuclear weapon stems from the boosted-fission chain reaction in the primary stage and the fissioning and “burning” of thermonuclear fuel in the secondary (and any subsequent) stage, with roughly 50 to 75 percent of the total energy produced by fission and the remainder by fusion. However, to obtain tailored weapon effects or to meet certain weight or space constraints, different ratios of fission yield to fusion yield may be employed, ranging from nearly pure fission weapons to a weapon where a very high proportion of the yield is from fusion.

Another tailored weapon is the enhanced radiation warhead, or neutron bomb, a low-yield (on the order of one kiloton), two-stage thermonuclear device designed to intensify the production of lethal fast neutrons in order to maximize mortality rates while producing less damage to buildings. The enhanced radiation is in the form of fast neutrons produced by the fusion of deuterium and tritium. The secondary contains little or no fissionable material, since this would increase the blast effect without significantly increasing the intensity of fast neutrons. The United States produced enhanced-radiation warheads for antiballistic missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, and artillery shells.

The effects of nuclear weapons

Nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from conventional weapons because of the vast amounts of explosive energy they can release and the kinds of effects they produce, such as high temperatures and radiation. The prompt effects of a nuclear explosion and fallout are well known through data gathered from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan; from more than 500 atmospheric and more than 1,500 underground nuclear tests conducted worldwide; and from extensive calculations and computer modeling. Longer-term effects on human health and the environment are less certain but have been extensively studied. The impacts of a nuclear explosion depend on many factors, including the design of the weapon (fission or fusion) and its yield; whether the detonation takes place in the air (and at what altitude), on the surface, underground, or underwater; the meteorological and environmental conditions; and whether the target is urban, rural, or military.

When a nuclear weapon detonates, a fireball occurs with temperatures similar to those at the centre of the Sun. The energy emitted takes several forms. Approximately 85 percent of the explosive energy produces air blast (and shock) and thermal radiation (heat). The remaining 15 percent is released as initial radiation, produced within the first minute or so, and residual (or delayed) radiation, emitted over a period of time, some of which can be in the form of local fallout.

Blast

The expansion of intensely hot gases at extremely high pressures in a nuclear fireball generates a shock wave that expands outward at high velocity. The “overpressure,” or crushing pressure, at the front of the shock wave can be measured in pascals (or kilopascals; kPa) or in pounds per square inch (psi). The greater the overpressure, the more likely that a given structure will be damaged by the sudden impact of the wave front. A related destructive effect comes from the “dynamic pressure,” or high-velocity wind, that accompanies the shock wave. An ordinary two-story, wood-frame house will collapse at an overpressure of 34.5 kPa (5 psi). A one-megaton weapon exploded at an altitude of 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) will generate overpressure of this magnitude out to 7 km (about 4 miles) from the point of detonation. The winds that follow will hurl a standing person against a wall with several times the force of gravity. Within 8 km (5 miles) few people in the open or in ordinary buildings will likely be able to survive such a blast. Enormous amounts of masonry, glass, wood, metal, and other debris created by the initial shock wave will fly at velocities above 160 km (100 miles) per hour, causing further destruction.

Thermal radiation

As a rule of thumb, approximately 35 percent of the total energy yield of an airburst is emitted as thermal radiation—light and heat capable of causing skin burns and eye injuries and starting fires of combustible material at considerable distances. The shock wave, arriving later, may spread fires further. If the individual fires are extensive enough, they can coalesce into a mass fire known as a firestorm, generating a single convective column of rising hot gases that sucks in fresh air from the periphery. The inward-rushing winds and the extremely high temperatures generated in a firestorm consume virtually everything combustible. At Hiroshima the incendiary effects were quite different from those at Nagasaki, in part because of differences in terrain. The firestorm that raged over the level terrain of Hiroshima left 11.4 square km (4.4 square miles) severely damaged—roughly four times the area burned in the hilly terrain of Nagasaki.

Initial radiation

A special feature of a nuclear explosion is the emission of nuclear radiation, which may be separated into initial radiation and residual radiation. Initial radiation, also known as prompt radiation, consists of gamma rays and neutrons produced within a minute of the detonation. Beta particles (free electrons) and a small proportion of alpha particles (helium nuclei, i.e., two protons and two neutrons bound together) are also produced, but these particles have short ranges and typically will not reach Earth’s surface if the weapon is detonated high enough above ground. Gamma rays and neutrons can produce harmful effects in living organisms, a hazard that persists over considerable distances because of their ability to penetrate most structures. Though their energy is only about 3 percent of the total released in a nuclear explosion, they can cause a considerable proportion of the casualties.

Residual radiation and fallout

Residual radiation is defined as radiation emitted more than one minute after the detonation. If the fission explosion is an airburst, the residual radiation will come mainly from the weapon debris. If the explosion is on or near the surface, the soil, water, and other materials in the vicinity will be sucked upward by the rising cloud, causing early (local) and delayed (worldwide) fallout. Early fallout settles to the ground during the first 24 hours; it may contaminate large areas and be an immediate and extreme biological hazard. Delayed fallout, which arrives after the first day, consists of microscopic particles that are dispersed by prevailing winds and settle in low concentrations over possibly extensive portions of Earth’s surface.

A nuclear explosion produces a complex mix of more than 300 different isotopes of dozens of elements, with half-lifes from fractions of a second to millions of years. The total radioactivity of the fission products is extremely large at first, but it falls off at a fairly rapid rate as a result of radioactive decay. Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)

Electromagnetic pulse

A nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is the time-varying electromagnetic radiation resulting from a nuclear explosion. The development of the EMP is shaped by the initial nuclear radiation from the explosion—specifically, the gamma radiation. High-energy electrons are produced in the environment of the explosion when gamma rays collide with air molecules (a process called the Compton effect). Positive and negative charges in the atmosphere are separated as the lighter, negatively charged electrons are swept away from the explosion point and the heavier, positively charged ionized air molecules are left behind. This charge separation produces a large electric field. Asymmetries in the electric field are caused by factors such as the variation in air density with altitude and the proximity of the explosion to Earth’s surface. These asymmetries result in time-varying electrical currents that produce the EMP. The characteristics of the EMP depend strongly on the height of the explosion above the surface.

EMP was first noticed in the United States in the 1950s when electronic equipment failed because of induced currents and voltages during some nuclear tests. In 1960 the potential vulnerability of American military equipment and weapons systems to EMP was officially recognized. EMP can damage unprotected electronic equipment, such as radios, radars, televisions, telephones, computers, and other communication equipment and systems. EMP damage can occur at distances of tens, hundreds, or thousands of kilometres from a nuclear explosion, depending on the weapon yield and the altitude of the detonation. For example, in 1962 a failure of electronic components in street lights in Hawaii and activation of numerous automobile burglar alarms in Honolulu were attributed to a high-altitude U.S. nuclear test at Johnston Atoll, some 1,300 km (800 miles) to the southwest. For a high-yield explosion of approximately 10 megatons detonated 320 km (200 miles) above the centre of the continental United States, almost the entire country, as well as parts of Mexico and Canada, would be affected by EMP. Procedures to improve the ability of networks, especially military command and control systems, to withstand EMP are known as “hardening.”

The first atomic bombs

Discovery of nuclear fission

Following the discovery of the neutron by the British physicist James Chadwick in 1932 and artificial radioactivity by the French chemists Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in 1934, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi performed a series of experiments in which he exposed many elements to low-speed neutrons. When he exposed thorium and uranium, chemically different radioactive products resulted, indicating that new elements had been formed rather than merely different isotopes of the original elements. Many scientists concluded that Fermi had produced elements beyond uranium, then the last element in the periodic table, and so these elements became known as transuranium elements. In 1938 Fermi received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered that a radioactive barium isotope resulted from bombarding uranium with neutrons. The low-speed neutrons caused the uranium nucleus to fission, or break apart into two smaller pieces; the combined atomic numbers of the two pieces—for example, barium and krypton—equaled that of the uranium nucleus. To be sure of this surprising result, Hahn sent his findings to his colleague Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew who had fled to Sweden. With her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner concurred in the results and recognized the enormous energy potential.

In early January 1939, Frisch rushed to Copenhagen to inform the Danish scientist Niels Bohr of the discovery. Bohr was about to leave for a visit to the United States, where he reported the news to colleagues. The revelation set off experiments at many laboratories, and nearly 100 articles were published about the exciting phenomenon by the end of the year. Bohr, working with John Wheeler at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., postulated that the uranium isotope uranium-235 was the one undergoing fission; the other isotope, uranium-238, merely absorbed the neutrons. It was discovered that neutrons were also produced during the fission process; on average, each fissioning atom produced more than two neutrons. If the proper amount of material were assembled, these free neutrons might create a chain reaction. Under special conditions, a very fast chain reaction might produce a very large release of energy—in short, a weapon of fantastic power might be feasible.

Producing a controlled chain reaction

The possibility that an atomic bomb might first be developed by Nazi Germany alarmed many scientists and was drawn to the attention of U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt by Albert Einstein, then living in the United States. The president appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium, which reported on Nov. 1, 1939, that a chain reaction in uranium was possible, though unproved. Chain-reaction experiments with carbon and uranium were started in New York City at Columbia University, and in March 1940 it was confirmed that the isotope uranium-235 was responsible for low-speed neutron fission in uranium. The Advisory Committee on Uranium increased its support of the Columbia experiments and arranged for a study of possible methods for separating the uranium-235 isotope from the much more abundant uranium-238. (Naturally occurring uranium contains approximately 0.7 percent uranium-235, with most of the remainder being uranium-238.) The centrifuge process, in which the heavier isotope is spun to the outside, at first seemed the most useful method of isolating uranium-235. However, a rival process was proposed at Columbia in which gaseous uranium hexafluoride is diffused through barriers, or filters; slightly more molecules containing the lighter isotope, uranium-235, would pass through the filter than those containing the heavier isotope, slightly enriching the mixture on the far side. Using the gaseous diffusion method, more than a thousand stages, occupying many acres, were needed to enrich the mixture to 90 percent uranium-235.

During the summer of 1940, Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson of the University of California at Berkeley discovered element 93 (naming it neptunium, after the next planet after Uranus, for which uranium was named); they inferred that this element would decay into element 94. The Bohr and Wheeler fission theory suggested that one of the isotopes of this new element might also fission under low-speed neutron bombardment. Glenn T. Seaborg and his group, also at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered element 94 on Feb. 23, 1941, and during the following year they named it plutonium, made enough for experiments, and established its fission characteristics. Low-speed neutrons did indeed cause it to undergo fission and at a rate much higher than that of uranium-235. The Berkeley group, under physicist Ernest Lawrence, was also considering producing large quantities of uranium-235 by turning one of their cyclotrons into a super mass spectrograph. A mass spectrograph employs a magnetic field to bend a current of uranium ions; the heavier ions (such as uranium-238) bend at a larger radius than the lighter ions (such as uranium-235), allowing the two separated currents to be collected in different receivers.

In May 1941 a review committee reported that a nuclear explosive probably could not be available before 1945. A chain reaction in natural uranium was probably 18 months off, and it would take at least an additional year to produce enough plutonium and three to five years to separate enough uranium-235 for a bomb. Further, it was held that all of these estimates were optimistic. In late June 1941 President Roosevelt established the Office of Scientific Research and Development under the direction of the scientist Vannevar Bush, subsuming the National Defense Research Committee that had directed the nation’s mobilization effort to utilize science for weapon development the previous year.

In the fall of 1941 the Columbia chain-reaction experiment with natural uranium and carbon yielded negative results. A review committee concluded that boron impurities might be poisoning it by absorbing neutrons. It was decided to transfer all such work to the University of Chicago and repeat the experiment there with high-purity carbon. This eventually led to the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction, achieved by Fermi and his group on Dec. 2, 1942, in the squash court under the stands of the university’s Stagg Field. At Berkeley, the cyclotron, converted into a mass spectrograph (later called a calutron), was exceeding expectations in separating uranium-235, and it was enlarged to a 10-calutron system capable of producing almost 3 grams (about 0.1 ounce) of uranium-235 per day.

Founding the Manhattan Project

The United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941 was decisive in providing funds for a massive research and production effort for obtaining fissionable materials, and in May 1942 the momentous decision was made to proceed simultaneously on all promising production methods. Vannevar Bush decided that the army should be brought into the production plant construction activities. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was given the job in mid-June, and Col. James C. Marshall was selected to head the project. Soon an office in New York City was opened, and in August the project was officially given the name Manhattan Engineer District—hence Manhattan Project, the name by which this effort would be known ever afterward. Over the summer, Bush and others felt that progress was not proceeding quickly enough, and the army was pressured to find another officer that would take more decisive action. Col. Leslie R. Groves replaced Marshall on September 17 and immediately began making major decisions from his headquarters office in Washington, D.C. After his first week a workable oversight arrangement was achieved with the formation of a three-man military policy committee chaired by Bush (with chemist James B. Conant as his alternate) along with representatives from the army and the navy.

Throughout the next few months, Groves (by then a brigadier general) chose the three key sites—Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Hanford, Wash.—and selected the large corporations to build and operate the atomic factories. In December contracts were signed with the DuPont Company to design, construct, and operate the plutonium production reactors and to develop the plutonium separation facilities. Two types of factories to enrich uranium were built at Oak Ridge.

On November 16 Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer visited the Los Alamos Ranch School, some 100 km (60 miles) north of Albuquerque, N.M., and on November 25 Groves approved it as the site for the main scientific laboratory, often referred to by its code name Project Y. The previous month, Groves had decided to choose Oppenheimer to be the scientific director of the laboratory where the design, development, and final manufacture of the weapon would take place. By July 1943 two essential and encouraging pieces of experimental data had been obtained—plutonium did give off neutrons in fission, more than uranium-235; and the neutrons were emitted in a short time compared to that needed to bring the weapon materials into a supercritical assembly. The theorists working on the project contributed one discouraging note, however, as their estimate of the critical mass for uranium-235 had risen more than threefold, to something between 23 and 45 kg (50 and 100 pounds).

Selecting a weapon design

The emphasis during the summer and fall of 1943 was on the gun method of assembly, in which the projectile, a subcritical piece of uranium-235 (or plutonium-239), would be placed in a gun barrel and fired into the target, another subcritical piece. After the mass was joined (and now supercritical), a neutron source would be used to start the chain reaction. A problem developed with applying the gun method to plutonium, however. In manufacturing plutonium-239 from uranium-238 in a reactor, some of the plutonium-239 absorbed a neutron and became plutonium-240. This material underwent spontaneous fission, producing neutrons. Some neutrons would always be present in a plutonium assembly and would cause it to begin multiplying as soon as it “went critical” but before it reached supercriticality; the assembly would then explode prematurely and produce comparatively little energy. The gun designers tried to overcome this problem by achieving higher projectile speeds, but they lost out in the end to a better idea—the implosion method.

In late April 1943 a Project Y physicist, Seth H. Neddermeyer, proposed the first serious theoretical analysis of implosion. His arguments showed that it would be feasible to compress a solid sphere of plutonium by surrounding it with high explosives and that this method would be superior to the gun method both in its higher velocity and in its shorter path of assembly. John von Neumann, a mathematician who had experience in working on shaped-charge, armour-piercing projectiles, supported the implosion method enthusiastically and went on to be a major contributor to the design of the high-explosive “lenses” that would focus the compression inward. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that because the material was compressed, less of it would be needed. By late 1943 the implosion method was being given a higher priority, and by July 1944 it had become clear that an efficient gun-assembly device could not be built with plutonium. Los Alamos’ central research mission rapidly shifted to solve the new challenge. Refinements in design eventually resulted in a solid 6-kg (13-pound) sphere of plutonium, with a small hole in the centre for the neutron initiator, that would be compressed by imploding lenses of high explosive.

Racing to build the bombs

By 1944 the Manhattan Project was spending money at a rate of more than $1 billion per year. The situation was likened to a horse race—no one could say which of the horses (the calutron plant, the diffusion plant, or the plutonium reactors) was likely to win or whether any of them would even finish the race. In July 1944 the first Y-12 calutrons had been running for three months but were operating at less than 50 percent efficiency; the main problem was in recovering the large amounts of material that splattered throughout the innards of the calutron without reaching the uranium-235 or uranium-238 receiver bins. The gaseous diffusion plant, known as K-25, was far from completion, with the production of satisfactory barriers remaining the major problem. And the first plutonium reactor at Hanford had been turned on in September, but it had promptly turned itself off. Solving this problem, which proved to be caused by absorption of neutrons by one of the fission products, took several months. These delays meant almost certainly that the war in Europe would be over before the weapon could be ready. The ultimate target was slowly changing from Germany to Japan.

Within 24 hours of Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, Pres. Harry S. Truman was told briefly about the atomic bomb by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. On April 25 Stimson, with Groves’s assistance, gave Truman a more extensive briefing on the status of the project: the uranium-235 gun design had been finalized, but a sufficient quantity of uranium-235 would not be accumulated until about August 1. Enough plutonium-239 would be available for an implosion assembly to be tested in early July; a second would be ready in August. Several dozen B-29 bombers had been modified to carry the weapons, and construction of a staging base was under way at Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, 2,400 km (1,500 miles) south of Japan.

The test of the plutonium weapon was named Trinity; it was fired at 5:29:45 AM on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico. The theorists’ predictions of the energy release, or yield, of the device ranged from the equivalent of less than 1,000 tons of TNT to the equivalent of 45,000 tons (that is, from 1 to 45 kilotons of TNT). The test actually produced a yield of about 21,000 tons.

The weapons are used

A single B-29 bomber named Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima, Japan, on Monday, Aug. 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM. The untested uranium-235 gun-assembly bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, was airburst 580 metres (1,900 feet) above the city to maximize destruction; it was later estimated to yield 15 kilotons. Two-thirds of the city area was destroyed. The population present at the time was estimated at 350,000; of these, 140,000 died by the end of the year. The second weapon, a duplicate of the plutonium-239 implosion assembly tested in Trinity and nicknamed Fat Man, was to be dropped on Kokura on August 11; a third was being prepared in the United States for possible use 7 to 10 days later. To avoid bad weather, the schedule for Fat Man was moved up two days to August 9. A B-29 named Bockscar spent 45 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point. The air crew then proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, where at 11:02 AM the weapon was airburst at 500 metres (1,650 feet); it was later estimated that the explosion yielded 21 kilotons. About half of Nagasaki was destroyed, and about 70,000 of some 270,000 people present at the time of the blast died by the end of the year.

The first hydrogen bombs

Origins of the “Super”

U.S. research on thermonuclear weapons was started by a conversation in September 1941 between Fermi and Teller. Fermi wondered if the explosion of a fission weapon could ignite a mass of deuterium sufficiently to begin nuclear fusion. (Deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron in the nucleus—i.e., twice the normal weight—makes up 0.015 percent of natural hydrogen and can be separated in quantity by electrolysis and distillation. It exists in liquid form only below about −250 °C, or −418 °F, depending on pressure.) Teller undertook to analyze thermonuclear processes in some detail and presented his findings to a group of theoretical physicists convened by Oppenheimer in Berkeley in the summer of 1942. One participant, Emil Konopinski, suggested that the use of tritium be investigated as a thermonuclear fuel, an insight that would later be important to most designs. (Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and two neutrons in the nucleus—i.e., three times the normal weight—does not exist in nature except in trace amounts, but it can be made by irradiating lithium in a nuclear reactor.)

As a result of these discussions, the participants concluded that a weapon based on thermonuclear fusion was possible. When the Los Alamos laboratory was being planned, a small research program on the Super, as the thermonuclear design came to be known, was included. Several conferences were held at the laboratory in late April 1943 to acquaint the new staff members with the existing state of knowledge and the direction of the research program. The consensus was that modest thermonuclear research should be pursued along theoretical lines. Teller proposed more intensive investigations, and some work did proceed, but the more urgent task of developing a fission weapon always took precedence—a necessary prerequisite for a thermonuclear bomb in any event.

In the fall of 1945, after the success of the atomic bomb and the end of World War II, the future of the Manhattan Project, including Los Alamos and the other facilities, was unclear. Government funding was severely reduced, many scientists returned to universities and to their careers, and contractor companies turned to other pursuits. The Atomic Energy Act, signed by President Truman on Aug. 1, 1946, established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), replacing the Manhattan Engineer District, and gave it civilian authority over all aspects of atomic energy, including oversight of nuclear warhead research, development, testing, and production.

From April 18 to 20, 1946, a conference led by Teller at Los Alamos reviewed the status of the Super. At that time it was believed that a fission weapon could be used to ignite one end of a cylinder of liquid deuterium and that the resulting thermonuclear reaction would self-propagate to the other end. This conceptual design was known as the “classical Super.”

One of the two central design problems was how to ignite the thermonuclear fuel. It was recognized early on that a mixture of deuterium and tritium theoretically could be ignited at lower temperatures and would have a faster reaction time than deuterium alone, but the question of how to achieve ignition remained unresolved. The other problem, equally difficult, was whether and under what conditions burning might proceed in thermonuclear fuel once ignition had taken place. An exploding thermonuclear weapon involves many extremely complicated, interacting physical and nuclear processes. The speeds of the exploding materials can be up to millions of metres per second, temperatures and pressures are greater than those at the centre of the Sun, and timescales are billionths of a second. To resolve whether the classical Super or any other design would work required accurate numerical models of these processes—a formidable task, especially as the computers needed to perform the calculations were still under development. Also, the requisite fission triggers were not yet ready, and the limited resources of Los Alamos could not support an extensive program.

Policy differences, technical problems

On Sept. 23, 1949, President Truman announced, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” This first Soviet test (see below The Soviet Union) stimulated an intense four-month secret debate about whether to proceed with the hydrogen bomb project. One of the strongest statements of opposition against proceeding with the program came from the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC, chaired by Oppenheimer. In their report of Oct. 30, 1949, the majority recommended “strongly against” initiating an all-out effort, believing “that the extreme dangers to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweigh any military advantages that could come from this development.” “A super bomb,” they went on to say, “might become a weapon of genocide” and “should never be produced.” Two members went even further, stating: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, State Department, Defense Department, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and a special subcommittee of the National Security Council all recommended proceeding with the hydrogen bomb. On Jan. 31, 1950, Truman announced that he had directed the AEC to continue its work on all forms of nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs.

In the months that followed Truman’s decision, the prospect of building a thermonuclear weapon seemed less and less likely. Mathematician Stanislaw M. Ulam, with the assistance of Cornelius J. Everett, had undertaken calculations of the amount of tritium that would be needed for ignition of the classical Super. Their results were spectacular and discouraging: the amount needed was estimated to be enormous. In the summer of 1950, more detailed and thorough calculations by other members of the Los Alamos Theoretical Division confirmed Ulam’s estimates. This meant that the cost of the Super program would be prohibitive.

Also in the summer of 1950, Fermi and Ulam calculated that liquid deuterium probably would not “burn”—that is, there would probably be no self-sustaining and propagating reaction. Barring surprises, therefore, the theoretical work to 1950 indicated that every important assumption regarding the viability of the classical Super was wrong. If success was to come, it would have to be accomplished by other means.

The Teller-Ulam configuration

The other means became apparent between February and April 1951, following breakthroughs achieved at Los Alamos. One breakthrough was the recognition that the burning of thermonuclear fuel would be more efficient if a high density were achieved throughout the fuel prior to raising its temperature, rather than the classical Super approach of just raising the temperature in one area and then relying on the propagation of thermonuclear reactions to heat the remaining fuel. A second breakthrough was the recognition that these conditions—high compression and high temperature throughout the fuel—could be achieved by containing and converting the radiation from an exploding fission weapon and then using this energy to compress a separate component containing the thermonuclear fuel.

The major figures in these breakthroughs were Ulam and Teller. In December 1950 Ulam had proposed a new fission weapon design, using the mechanical shock of an ordinary fission bomb to compress to a very high density a second fissile core. (This two-stage fission device was conceived entirely independently of the thermonuclear program, its aim being to use fissionable materials more economically.) Early in 1951, Ulam went to see Teller and proposed that the two-stage approach be used to compress and ignite a thermonuclear secondary. Teller suggested radiation implosion, rather than mechanical shock, as the mechanism for compressing the thermonuclear fuel in the second stage. On March 9, 1951, Teller and Ulam presented a report containing both alternatives, titled On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors. A second report, dated April 4, by Teller, included some extensive calculations by Frederic de Hoffmann and elaborated on how a thermonuclear bomb could be constructed. The two-stage radiation implosion design proposed by these reports, which led to the modern concept of thermonuclear weapons, became known as the Teller-Ulam configuration.

The weapons are tested

It was immediately clear to all scientists concerned that these new ideas—achieving a high density in the thermonuclear fuel by compression using a fission primary—provided for the first time a firm basis for a fusion weapon. Without hesitation, Los Alamos adopted the new program. Gordon Dean, chairman of the AEC, convened a meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., hosted by Oppenheimer, on June 16–17, 1951, where the new idea was discussed. In attendance were the GAC members, AEC commissioners, and key scientists and consultants from Los Alamos and Princeton. The participants were unanimously in favour of active and rapid pursuit of the Teller-Ulam principle.

Just prior to the conference, on May 8 at Enewetak atoll in the western Pacific, a test explosion named George had successfully used a fission bomb to ignite a small quantity of deuterium and tritium. The original purpose of George had been to confirm the burning of these thermonuclear fuels (about which there had never been any doubt), but with the new conceptual understanding contributed by Teller and Ulam, the test provided the bonus of successfully demonstrating radiation implosion.

In September 1951, Los Alamos proposed a test of the Teller-Ulam concept for November 1952. Richard L. Garwin, a 23-year-old University of Chicago postgraduate student of Enrico Fermi’s, who was at Los Alamos in the summer of 1951, was primarily responsible for transforming Teller and Ulam’s theoretical ideas into a workable engineering design for the device used in the Mike test. The Mike device weighed 82 tons, in part because of cryogenic (low-temperature) refrigeration equipment necessary to keep the deuterium in liquid form. It was successfully detonated during Operation Ivy, on Nov. 1, 1952, at Enewetak. The explosion achieved a yield of 10.4 megatons (million tons), 500 times larger than the Nagasaki bomb, and it produced a crater 1,900 metres (6,240 feet) in diameter and 50 metres (164 feet) deep.

Further refinements

With the Teller-Ulam configuration proved, deliverable thermonuclear weapons were designed and initially tested during Operation Castle in 1954. The first test of the series, conducted on March 1, 1954, was called Bravo. It used solid lithium deuteride rather than liquid deuterium and produced a yield of 15 megatons, 1,000 times as large as the Hiroshima bomb. Here the principal thermonuclear reaction was the fusion of deuterium and tritium. The tritium was produced in the weapon itself by neutron bombardment of the lithium-6 isotope in the course of the fusion reaction. Using lithium deuteride instead of liquid deuterium eliminated the need for cumbersome cryogenic equipment.

With the completion of Castle, the feasibility of lightweight, solid-fuel thermonuclear weapons was proved. Vast quantities of tritium would not be needed after all. Refinements of the basic two-stage Teller-Ulam configuration resulted in thermonuclear weapons with a wide variety of characteristics and applications. Some high-yield deliverable weapons incorporated additional thermonuclear fuel (lithium deuteride) and fissionable material (uranium-235 and uranium-238) in a third stage. The largest American bombs had yields of 10 to 25 megatons and weighed up to 20 tons. Beginning in the early 1960s, however, the United States built a variety of smaller, lighter weapons that exhibited steadily improving yield-to-weight and yield-to-volume ratios. By the time nuclear testing ended in 1992, the United States had conducted 1,030 tests of weapons of every conceivable shape, size, and purpose. After 1992, computers and nonnuclear tests were used to validate the safety and reliability of America’s nuclear stockpile—though the view was widely held that entirely new computer-generated weapon designs could not be considered reliable without actual testing.

The spread of nuclear weapons

The Axis powers

During World War II, scientists in several countries performed experiments in connection with nuclear reactors and fission weapons, but only the United States carried its projects as far as separating uranium-235 or manufacturing plutonium-239.

By the time the war began on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany had a special office for the military application of nuclear fission, where chain-reaction experiments with uranium and graphite were being planned and ways of separating the uranium isotopes were under study. Some measurements on graphite, later shown to be in error, led physicist Werner Heisenberg to recommend that heavy water be used, instead, for the moderator. This dependence on scarce heavy water was a major reason the German experiments never reached a successful conclusion. The isotope separation studies were oriented toward low enrichments (about 1 percent uranium-235) for the chain reaction experiments; they never got past the laboratory apparatus stage, and several times these prototypes were destroyed in bombing attacks. As for the fission weapon itself, it was a rather distant goal, and practically nothing but “back-of-the-envelope” studies were done on it.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, Japanese scientists initiated research on an atomic bomb. In December 1940, Japan’s leading nuclear scientist, Nishina Yoshio, undertook a small-scale research effort supported by the armed forces. It did not progress beyond the laboratory, because of a lack of government support, resources, and uranium.

The United Kingdom

Atomic weapons

The British atomic weapon project started informally, as in the United States, among university physicists. In April 1940 a short paper by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, expanding on the idea of critical mass, estimated that a superweapon could be built using several pounds of pure uranium-235 and that this amount of material might be obtainable from a chain of diffusion tubes. This three-page memorandum was the first report to foretell with scientific conviction the practical possibility of making a bomb and the horrors it would bring. A group of scientists known as the MAUD committee was set up in the Ministry of Aircraft Production in April 1940 to decide if a uranium bomb could be made. The committee approved a report on July 15, 1941, concluding that the scheme for a uranium bomb was practicable, that work should continue on the highest priority, and that collaboration with the Americans should be continued and expanded. As the war took its toll on the economy, the British position evolved through 1942 and 1943 to one of full support for the American project with the realization that Britain’s major effort would come after the war. While the British program was sharply reduced at home, approximately 90 scientists and engineers went to the United States at the end of 1943 and during 1944 to work on various aspects of the Manhattan Project. The valuable knowledge and experience they acquired sped the development of the British atomic bomb after 1945.

After the war a formal decision to manufacture a British atomic bomb was made by Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s government during a meeting of the Defence Subcommittee of the Cabinet in early January 1947. The construction of a first reactor to produce fissile material and associated facilities had got under way the year before. William Penney, a member of the British team at Los Alamos, N.M., U.S., during the war, was placed in charge of fabricating and testing the bomb, which was to be of a plutonium type similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. That Britain was developing nuclear weapons was not made public until Feb. 17, 1952, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared plans to test the first British-made atomic bomb at the Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia; Churchill made the official announcement in a speech before the House of Commons on February 26, at which time he also reported that the country had the manufacturing infrastructure to insure regular production of the bomb. On Oct. 3, 1952, the first British atomic weapons test, called Hurricane, was successfully conducted aboard the frigate HMS Plym, with an estimated yield of 25 kilotons. By early 1954, Royal Air Force (RAF) Canberra bombers were armed with atomic bombs. Under a program known as Project E, squadrons of Canberras as well as Valiant bombers were supplied with American nuclear bombs—until early 1965 for Bomber Command in the United Kingdom and until 1969 for the Royal Air Force in Germany—before being replaced with British models.

Thermonuclear weapons

The formal decision to develop thermonuclear weapons was made in secret on June 16, 1954, by a small Defence Policy Committee chaired by Churchill. The prime minister informed the cabinet on July 7, arguing that Britain needed the most modern weapons if it was to remain a world power. A discussion ensued that day and the next to consider questions of cost, morality, world influence and standing, proliferation, and public opinion. Cabinet agreement was reached later that month to support plans to produce hydrogen bombs. More than six months would pass before the public learned of the decision. Minister of Defence Harold Macmillan announced in his Statement on Defence on Feb. 17, 1955, that the United Kingdom planned to develop and produce hydrogen bombs. A debate in the House of Commons took place the first two days of March, and Churchill gave a riveting speech on why Britain must have these new weapons.

At that point British scientists did not know how to make a thermonuclear bomb, a situation similar to their American counterparts after President Truman’s directive of January 1950. An important first step was to put William Cook in charge of the program. Cook, chief of the Royal Naval Scientific Service and a mathematician, was transferred to Aldermaston, a government research and development laboratory and manufacturing site in Berkshire, where he arrived in September to be deputy director to William Penney. Over the next year the staff increased and greater resources were committed to solving the difficult scientific and engineering problems they faced. The goal was to produce a one-megaton weapon. Megaton was defined loosely, and boosted designs (with yields in the hundreds of kilotons) were proposed to meet it. To achieve a modern Teller-Ulam design, a consensus began to form around a staged device with compression of the secondary. These ideas were informed by analyzing the debris from the 1954 Castle series of tests by the United States as well as Joe-19, the Soviet Union’s successful test in November 1955 of its first true two-stage thermonuclear bomb. Precisely how the essential ideas emerged and evolved and when the design was finalized remain unclear, but by the spring of 1956 there was growing confidence that solutions were close at hand. The British thermonuclear project, like its American and Soviet counterparts, was a team effort in which the work of many people led to eventual success. Among major contributors were Keith Roberts, Bryan Taylor, John Corner, and Ken Allen.

Sites in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at Christmas Island and at Malden Island were chosen to test several designs of prototype weapons in the spring of 1957. Three devices were tested in May and June at Malden, the second one a huge fission bomb, slightly boosted, producing a yield of 720 kilotons. Though the first and third tests did demonstrate staging and radiation implosion, their yields of 300 and 200 kilotons were disappointing, indicating that there were still design problems. On the morning of November 8, a two-stage device inside a Blue Danube case was successfully detonated at 2,200 metres (7,200 feet) over Christmas Island, with a yield calculated at 1.8 megatons. Britain now had an effective thermonuclear bomb. Further refinements in design to make lighter, more compact, and more efficient bombs culminated in a three-megaton test on April 28, 1958, and four more tests in August and September. Conducted just before a nuclear test moratorium that began in October 1958 and lasted until September 1961, this final series of British atmospheric tests solidified the boosted designs and contributed novel ideas to modern thermonuclear weapons.

The British deterrent force

From 1962 to 1991 Britain conducted 24 underground tests jointly with the United States at the U.S. test site in Nevada to develop warheads for several types of aircraft bombs and missile warheads. During the 1950s the RAF’s “V-bomber” force of Valiant, Vulcan, and Victor aircraft was introduced into service to carry a variety of fission and fusion bombs. In June 1969 the strategic deterrent role was transferred to the Royal Navy’s Polaris submarine force, and in the 1990s these boats were replaced by Vanguard-class submarines carrying American Trident II ballistic missiles armed with British warheads. RAF aircraft continued to serve in other roles until March 1998, when the last British nuclear bombs were withdrawn from service.

The Soviet Union

Atomic weapons

In the decade before World War II, Soviet physicists were actively engaged in nuclear and atomic research. By 1939 they had established that, once uranium has been fissioned, each nucleus emits neutrons and can therefore, at least in theory, begin a chain reaction. The following year, physicists concluded that such a chain reaction could be ignited in either natural uranium or its isotope uranium-235 and that this reaction could be sustained and controlled with a moderator such as heavy water. In July 1940 the Soviet Academy of Sciences established the Uranium Commission to study the “uranium problem.”

By February 1939 news had reached Soviet physicists of the discovery of nuclear fission in the West. The military implications of such a discovery were immediately apparent, but Soviet research was brought to a halt by the German invasion in June 1941. In early 1942 Soviet physicist Georgy N. Flerov noticed that articles on nuclear fission were no longer appearing in Western journals—an indication that research on the subject had become classified. In response, Flerov wrote to, among others, Premier Joseph Stalin, insisting that “we must build the uranium bomb without delay.” In 1943 Stalin ordered the commencement of a research project under the supervision of Igor V. Kurchatov, who had been director of the nuclear physics laboratory at the Physico-Technical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Under Kurchatov’s direction, Laboratory No. 2 was established in April to conduct the new program. (After the war it was renamed the Laboratory of Measurement Devices of the Academy of Sciences and subsequently became the Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute.) Kurchatov initiated work on three fronts: designing an experimental uranium pile and achieving a chain reaction, exploring methods to separate the isotope uranium-235, and—after receiving Western intelligence about its feasibility as a weapon material—studying the properties of plutonium and how it might be produced.

Throughout 1944 the scale of the program remained small. The war ground on, the prospects of an actual weapon seemed remote, and scarce funds kept the number of employees working under Kurchatov limited. By the time of the Potsdam Conference, which brought the Allied leaders together the day after the Trinity test was conducted by the United States in July 1945, the project on the atomic bomb was about to change dramatically. During one session at the conference, Truman remarked to Stalin that the United States had built a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin replied that he would like to see the United States make “good use of it against the Japanese.”

After the Americans dropped two bombs on Japan in early August 1945, the full force of the importance of this new weapon finally hit Stalin, and he ordered a crash program to have an atomic bomb as quickly as possible. In late August a Special Committee chaired by Lavrenty P. Beria, chief of the NKVD (Soviet secret police and forerunner of the KGB), was established to oversee the Soviet version of the Manhattan Project. Over the next four years the full resources of the Soviet Union were mobilized to build the bomb, including extensive use of prison labour from the Gulag to mine uranium and build the plants. The first Soviet chain reaction took place in Moscow on Dec. 25, 1946, using an experimental graphite-moderated natural uranium pile known as F-1. The first plutonium production reactor became operational at the Chelyabinsk-40 (later known as Chelyabinsk-65 and now Ozersk) complex in the Ural Mountains, on June 19, 1948. Eight months later the first batch of plutonium was produced. After separating the irradiated uranium fuel in the nearby radio-chemical plant, it was converted into plutonium metal and shaped into hemispheres. The components then went to the “Installation” (KB-11), located in what became the secret Soviet city of Sarov, 400 km (250 miles) southeast of Moscow, for final assembly. Later known as Arzamas-16 (currently the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics), the secret laboratory was similar to Los Alamos in that the first bombs were designed and assembled there.

The role of espionage in the making of the Soviet atomic bomb has been acknowledged since 1950, with the arrests in Britain of the German-born Klaus Fuchs and in the United States of the American couple Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. New information made available from Russian sources following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, demonstrated that espionage was more extensive than previously known and was more important to the Soviets’ success. Throughout the war and afterward, Beria’s spies amassed significant amounts of technical data that saved Kurchatov and his team valuable time and scarce resources. The first Soviet test occurred on Aug. 29, 1949, using a plutonium device (known in the West as Joe-1) with a yield of approximately 20 kilotons. A direct copy of the Fat Man bomb tested at Trinity and dropped on Nagasaki, Joe-1 was based on plans supplied by Fuchs and by Theodore A. Hall, the latter a second key spy at Los Alamos whose activities were discovered only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Thermonuclear weapons

In June 1948 Igor Y. Tamm was appointed to head a special research group at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute (FIAN) to investigate the possibility of building a thermonuclear bomb. Andrey Sakharov joined Tamm’s group and, with his colleagues Vitaly Ginzburg and Yury Romanov, worked on calculations produced by Yakov Zeldovich’s group at the Institute of Chemical Physics. As recounted by Sakharov, the Russian discovery of the major ideas behind the thermonuclear bomb went through several stages.

The first design, proposed by Sakharov in 1948, consisted of alternating layers of deuterium and uranium-238 between a fissile core and a surrounding chemical high explosive. Known as Sloika (“Layer Cake”), the design was refined by Ginzburg in 1949 through the substitution of lithium-6 deuteride for the liquid deuterium. When bombarded with neutrons, lithium-6 breeds tritium, which can fuse with deuterium to release more energy.

In March 1950 Sakharov arrived at KB-11. Under the scientific leadership of Yuly Khariton, work at KB-11 had begun three years earlier to develop and produce Soviet nuclear weapons. Members of the Tamm and the Zeldovich groups also went to KB-11 to work on the thermonuclear bomb. A Layer Cake bomb, known in the West as Joe-4 and in the Soviet Union as RDS-6, was detonated on Aug. 12, 1953, with a yield of 400 kilotons. Significantly, it was a deliverable thermonuclear bomb—a milestone that the United States would not reach until May 20, 1956—and also the first use of solid lithium-6 deuteride. Finally, a more efficient two-stage nuclear configuration using radiation compression (analogous to the Teller-Ulam design) was detonated on Nov. 22, 1955. Known in the West as Joe-19 and RDS-37 in the Soviet Union, the thermonuclear bomb was dropped from a bomber at the Semipalatinsk (now Semey, Kazakh.) test site. As recounted by Sakharov, this test “crowned years of effort [and] opened the way for a whole range of devices with remarkable capabilities…it had essentially solved the problem of creating high-performance thermonuclear weapons.”

The Soviet Union conducted 715 tests between 1949 and 1990, out of which came a wide variety of weapons, from nuclear artillery shells to multimegaton missile warheads and bombs. On Oct. 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a 58-megaton nuclear device, later revealed to have been tested at approximately half of its optimal design yield.

France

French scientists, such as Henri Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie, and Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, made important contributions to 20th-century atomic physics. During World War II several French scientists participated in an Anglo-Canadian project in Canada, where eventually a heavy water reactor was built at Chalk River, Ont., in 1945.

On Oct. 18, 1945, the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique; CEA) was established by Gen. Charles de Gaulle with the objective of exploiting the scientific, industrial, and military potential of atomic energy. The military application of atomic energy did not begin until 1951. In July 1952 the National Assembly adopted a five-year plan with a primary goal of building plutonium production reactors. Work began on a reactor at Marcoule in the summer of 1954 and on a plutonium separating plant the following year.

On Dec. 26, 1954, the issue of proceeding with a French atomic bomb was raised at the cabinet level. The outcome was that Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France launched a secret program to develop an atomic bomb. On Nov. 30, 1956, a protocol was signed specifying tasks the CEA and the Defense Ministry would perform. These included providing the plutonium, assembling a device, and preparing a test site. Key figures in developing the atomic bomb were Pierre Guillaumat, Gen. Charles Ailleret, and Yves Rocard. On July 22, 1958, de Gaulle, now president, set the date for the first atomic explosion to occur within the first three months of 1960. For de Gaulle especially, French attainment of the bomb symbolized independence and a role for France in geopolitical affairs. On Feb. 13, 1960, France detonated an atomic bomb from a 105-metre (344-foot) tower in the Sahara in what was then French Algeria. The plutonium implosion design had a yield of 60 to 70 kilotons, three times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. France carried out three more atmospheric and 13 additional underground tests in Algeria over the next six years before shifting its test site to the uninhabited atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa in the Pacific Ocean. France conducted 194 tests in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996. These resulted in ever-improving fission, boosted-fission, and two-stage thermonuclear warheads for a variety of weapon systems, including aircraft bombs and missiles and land-based and sea-based ballistic missiles.

In 1997 an account of the French thermonuclear bomb program by physicist Pierre Billaud revealed details about the scientists who were involved in discovering the key concepts. Billaud was a director of the Centre de Limeil, the main French warhead design laboratory, located outside Paris, and from 1966 through 1968 he was one of the central figures in developing the French thermonuclear bomb.

According to Billaud, after the success of February 1960, the priority of the Direction des Applications Militaires—the part of the CEA responsible for the research, development, testing, and production of French nuclear warheads—was to adapt warheads for delivery by Mirage IV aircraft and to refine fission weapon designs. Thermonuclear bomb research was secondary until 1966, when de Gaulle, feeling the pressure that China might cross the thermonuclear threshold ahead of France, strongly urged the CEA to find a solution and set 1968 as a deadline. Work at Limeil and at other labs in the CEA complex was stepped up as scientists sought to discover the key concepts. Physicist Michel Carayol laid out what would be the fundamental idea of radiation implosion in an April 1967 paper, but neither he nor his colleagues were immediately convinced that it was the solution, and the search continued.

In late September 1967, Carayol’s ideas were validated by an unlikely source, William Cook, who had overseen the British thermonuclear program in the mid-1950s. Cook, no doubt at his government’s behest, verbally passed on the crucial information to the French embassy’s military attaché in London. Presumably, the British provided this information for political reasons. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was lobbying for the entry of the United Kingdom into the Common Market (European Economic Community), which was being blocked by de Gaulle. Apparently, Wilson thought that sharing thermonuclear research with France would persuade de Gaulle to drop his country’s veto. The ploy failed, however, as France again vetoed British entry on Nov. 27, 1967.

With confirmation now in hand about the right path, France quickly made plans to test Carayol’s design at its Pacific test site. On Aug. 24, 1968 (14 months after the Chinese thermonuclear test), France entered the thermonuclear club with an explosion estimated at 2.6 megatons. On Sept. 8, 1968, Billaud supervised a second thermonuclear explosion, with a yield of 1.2 megatons.

China

After winning the civil war in 1949, the new Chinese communist leadership viewed the United States—which backed the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan—as its main foreign threat. A series of conflicts and confrontations, beginning with the Korean War (1950–53), made China fear American military action and the possible use of U.S. nuclear weapons against China.

In response, on Jan. 15, 1955, Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership decided to obtain their own nuclear arsenal. From 1955 to 1958 the Chinese were partially dependent on the Soviet Union for scientific and technological assistance, but from 1958 until the break in relations with the Soviet Union in 1960 they became more and more self-sufficient. Like the efforts of the other nuclear powers, China undertook the necessary large-scale mobilization of manpower and resources.

The major original facilities were built to produce and process uranium and plutonium at the Lanzhou Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex (JAEC), both in the northwestern province of Gansu. The reactor at JAEC began operation in 1967, and a large-scale reprocessing plant followed in April 1970. A design laboratory (called the Ninth Academy) was established at Haiyan, east of the Koko Nor (Blue Lake), Qinghai province, where initial production also took place. A test site at Lop Nur, in far northwestern China, was established in October 1959. Key figures in the Chinese bomb program included Wang Ganchang, Zhu Guangya, Deng Jiaxian, Peng Huanwu, Zhou Guangzhao, Yu Min, and Chen Nengkuan. Overall leadership and direction was provided by Marshal Nie Rongzhen, chairman of the State Science and Technology Commission from 1958 until 1967. As part of Mao’s “Third Line” program to build a duplicate industrial infrastructure in remote regions of China as a strategic reserve in the event of war, a more modern nuclear complex was completed in the 1970s and ’80s, supplementing and then replacing the original facilities.

Unlike the initial American, Soviet, and British tests, the first Chinese detonation—on Oct. 16, 1964—used uranium-235 in an implosion-type configuration that yielded 20 kilotons. Plutonium designs followed. Between 1964 and 1996 China conducted 23 atmospheric and 22 underground tests. This relatively limited number of tests resulted in a variety of fission and fusion warhead types with yields from a few kilotons to multimegatons.

China began to explore the feasibility of a thermonuclear bomb at the same time it initiated its atomic bomb program. More concrete plans to proceed were begun in December 1960, with the formation of a group by the Institute of Atomic Energy to do research on thermonuclear materials and reactions. In late 1963, after the design of the atomic bomb was complete, the Theoretical Department of the Ninth Academy, under the direction of Deng Jiaxian, was ordered to shift to thermonuclear work. Facilities were constructed to produce lithium-6 deuteride and other required components. By the end of 1965 the theoretical work for a multistage bomb had been completed, and manufacture of the test device was finished by the end of 1966. The first Chinese multistage fusion device, with a yield of three megatons, was detonated on June 17, 1967—this was only 32 months after China’s first atomic test, the shortest span of the first five nuclear powers.

India

India’s nuclear policies and programs were somewhat idiosyncratic, compared with those of the other nuclear powers, and went through three distinct phases: from 1947 to 1974, from 1974 to 1998, and from 1998 into the 21st century. In 1948 the newly independent country passed an Atomic Energy Act, first introduced by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The act established an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and Homi Bhabha was appointed its chairman. Bhabha had earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Cambridge and would be the central figure in shaping the Indian nuclear program, especially after becoming secretary of India’s Department of Atomic Energy in 1954. India took advantage of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, first articulated in a UN speech in December 1953. The purpose of the program was to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons by offering technology for civilian use in exchange for a promise not to pursue military applications. The goal backfired because the dual uses of atomic energy are inherent in the technologies—a fact as well as a problem that was recognized at the birth of the atomic era and that continues to this day.

In 1955 Canada offered to build India a heavy water research reactor, and the United States supplied some of the heavy water. The reactor was built at Trombay, near Bombay (Mumbai), which would become the primary location of India’s nuclear weapon program. (The facility was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre [BARC] after Bhabha died in 1966.) A reprocessing plant was built nearby to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods. The plant used the PUREX (plutonium-uranium-extraction) chemical method developed by the United States—a process that had been made known to the world through the Atoms for Peace program. Hundreds of Indian scientists and engineers were trained in all aspects of nuclear technologies at laboratories and universities in the United States. By 1964 India had its first weapon-grade plutonium. Over the next decade, in parallel with peaceful uses of atomic energy, military research proceeded, while India rejected the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

On May 18, 1974, at the Pokhran test site on the Rajasthan Steppe, India, detonated a nuclear device with a yield later estimated to be less than 5 kilotons. (A figure of 12 kilotons was announced by India at the time.) India characterized the underground test as being for peaceful purposes, adding that it had no intentions of producing nuclear weapons. Among the key scientists and engineers directly involved were Homi Sethna, chairman of the AEC, Raja Ramanna, head of the BARC physics group, and Rajagopala Chidambaram, who headed a team that designed the plutonium core. Chidambaram later became chairman of the AEC and oversaw the 1998 tests described below. Others mentioned with important roles were P.K. Iyengar, Satinder K. Sikka, Pranab R. Dastidar, Sekharipuram N.A. Seshadri, and Nagapattinam S. Venkatesan.

After 1974 India entered a second phase that lasted until 1998. During this period, India had the technical ability to produce nuclear weapons but maintained a policy of not deploying them. This ambivalent posture allowed India to continue its traditional stance of urging nuclear disarmament, while at the same time signaling that the military path was available to it if the situation warranted. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Indian scientists continued to refine nuclear designs, including boosting and theoretical work on thermonuclear weapons. Modification of certain types of aircraft and advances in ballistic missile programs brought the prospect of a deployed nuclear force ever closer—a development driven in part by Pakistan’s progress on its own nuclear weapons and by tensions with India’s traditional adversary, China.

On May 11, 1998, India entered it third phase by detonating three devices simultaneously at the Pokhran test site. A press statement claimed that one was a fission device with a yield of about 12 kilotons, one was a thermonuclear device with a yield of 43 kilotons, and the third was a tactical device with a yield of 0.2 kiloton. On May 13 two more tactical devices were detonated, with reported yields of 0.2 and 0.6 kiloton. Western experts later disputed the size of the yields and whether any of them were thermonuclear bombs. U.S. intelligence concluded that the second stage failed to ignite. There was also speculation that one of the tests may have used reactor-grade plutonium. Among the key figures were Abdul Kalam, head of India’s Defence Research and Development Organization, AEC chairman Rajagopala Chidambaram, BARC director Anil Kakodkar, and scientists M.S. Ramakumar, S.K. Gupta, and D.D. Sood.

Since 1998 India has moved forward with a vigorous program of developing weapon systems for the three branches of its armed forces. The emerging triad consists of the army’s land-based ballistic missiles, the air force’s air-delivered bombs, and the navy’s sea-based surface-launched ballistic missiles. India has not signed the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (an extension of the 1963 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty) and may need to test again.

Pakistan

Pakistan took advantage of the Atoms for Peace program by sending students abroad for training in nuclear technologies and by accepting an American-built research reactor, which began operation in 1965. Although its military nuclear research up to that point had been minimal, the situation soon changed. Pakistan’s quest for the atomic bomb was in direct response to its defeat by India in December 1971, which resulted in East Pakistan becoming the independent country of Bangladesh. Immediately after the cease-fire, in late January 1972, the new Pakistani president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, convened a meeting of his top scientists and ordered them to build an atomic bomb. Bhutto, always suspicious of India, had wanted Pakistan to have the bomb for years and was now in a position to make it happen. Earlier he had famously said, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no other choice.”

Pakistan’s route to the bomb was through the enrichment of uranium using high-speed gas centrifuges. A key figure was Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist who had earned a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in Belgium. Beginning in May 1972, he began work at a laboratory in Amsterdam that was a subcontractor of Ultra Centrifuge Nederland, the Dutch partner of URENCO. URENCO in turn was a joint enterprise created in 1970 by Great Britain, West Germany, and The Netherlands to ensure that they had an adequate supply of enriched uranium for their civilian power reactors. Khan was soon visiting the enrichment plant in Almelo, Neth., and over the next three years gained access to its classified centrifuge designs. Soon after the 1974 Indian test, he contacted Bhutto. In December 1975 Khan abruptly left his job and returned to Pakistan with blueprints and photographs of the centrifuges and contact information for dozens of companies that supplied the components.

In 1976 Khan began work with the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and in July he founded the Engineering Research Laboratories to build and operate a centrifuge plant in Kahuta using components that he had purchased from Europe and elsewhere. Khan would later use these contacts to form a vast black market network that sold or traded nuclear technology, centrifuges, and other items to North Korea, Iran, Libya, and possibly others. It would have been difficult for Khan to carry out some or all of these transactions without the knowledge of Pakistan’s leaders and its military and security services.

By April 1978 Pakistan had produced enriched uranium, and four years later it had weapon-grade uranium. By the mid-1980s thousands of centrifuges were turning out enough uranium for making several atomic bombs per year, and by 1988, according to Pakistan Army Chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, Pakistan had the capability to assemble a nuclear device. Khan likely had acquired the warhead design from China, apparently obtaining blueprints of an implosion device that was detonated in an October 1966 test, where uranium rather than plutonium was used.

In response to the Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, Pakistan claimed that it had successfully detonated five nuclear devices on May 28 in the Ros Koh Hills in the province of Balochistan and a sixth device two days later at a site 100 km (60 miles) to the southwest. As with the Indian nuclear claims, outside experts questioned the announced yields and even the number of tests. A single Western seismic measurement for May 28 suggested the yield was on the order of 9 to 12 kilotons rather than the official Pakistani announcement of 40 to 45 kilotons. For the May 30 nuclear test, Western estimates were from 4 to 6 kilotons rather than the official Pakistani figure of 15 to 18 kilotons. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that Pakistan had joined the nuclear club and that, with various ballistic and cruise missile programs under way, it was in an arms race with India.

Israel

Israel was the sixth country to acquire nuclear weapons, though it has never officially acknowledged the fact. Israel’s declared policy regarding nuclear weapons was first articulated in the mid-1960s by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol with the ambiguous statement, “Israel will not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons into the region.”

The Israeli nuclear program began in the mid-1950s. Three key figures are credited with its founding. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, made the decision to undertake a nuclear weapons program. From behind the scenes, Shimon Peres, director-general of the Ministry of Defense, selected personnel, allocated resources, and became the chief administrator of the entire project. Scientist Ernst David Bergmann, the first chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, provided early technical guidance. Crucial to Israel’s success was collaboration with France. Through Peres’s diplomatic efforts, in October 1957 France agreed to sell Israel a reactor and an underground reprocessing plant, which was built near the town of Dimona in the Negev desert. Many Israeli scientists and engineers were trained at French nuclear facilities. In another secret agreement, signed in 1959, Norway agreed to supply via Britain 20 metric tons of heavy water for the reactor.

In June 1958 a new research and development authority named RAFAEL (a Hebrew acronym for the Armaments Development Authority) was established within the Ministry of Defense to assist in the weaponization side of the project, along with the organization of the Dimona Nuclear Research Centre to be built in the Negev. Ground was broken at Dimona in late 1958 or early 1959. By 1965 the first plutonium had been produced, and on the eve of the Six-Day War (see Arab-Israeli wars) in June 1967 Israel had two or three assembled devices. Over the years the Dimona facility was upgraded to produce more plutonium. Other scientists known to have contributed to the Israeli nuclear program include Jenka Ratner, Avraham Hermoni, Israel Dostrovsky, Yosef Tulipman, and Shalheveth Freier.

Additional details about the Israeli nuclear program and arsenal have come to light as a result of revelations by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician who worked at Dimona from 1977 to 1985. Before leaving his job, Vanunu took dozens of photographs of Dimona’s most secret areas, as well as of plutonium components, of a full-scale model of a thermonuclear bomb, and of work on tritium that implied Israel might have built boosted weapons. He provided an extensive account of what he knew to the London Sunday Times, which published a story, “Inside Dimona, Israel’s Nuclear Bomb Factory,” on Oct. 5, 1986. Five days before the article was published, Vanunu was abducted in Rome by the Mossad (one of Israel’s intelligence agencies), taken to Israel, tried, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He spent 10 years of his prison term in solitary confinement. Later, American weapon designers analyzed the photographs and concluded that Israel’s nuclear arsenal was much larger than previously thought (perhaps between 100 and 200 weapons) and that Israel was capable of building a neutron bomb, a low-yield thermonuclear device that reduces blast and maximizes the radiation effect. (Israel may have tested a neutron bomb over the southern Indian Ocean on Sept. 22, 1979.) At the turn of the 21st century, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that Israel had 60 to 80 nuclear weapons.

South Africa

South Africa is the only country to have produced nuclear weapons and then voluntarily dismantled and destroyed them. On March 24, 1993, South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk informed the country’s parliament that South Africa had secretly produced six nuclear devices and had subsequently dismantled them prior to acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty on July 10, 1991.

In 1974 South Africa decided to develop a nuclear explosive capability allegedly for peaceful purposes, but after 1977 the program acquired military applications in response to growing fears about communist expansion on South Africa’s borders. The weapon program was highly compartmentalized, with probably no more than 10 people knowing all of the details, though about 1,000 persons were involved in different aspects. J.W. de Villiers is thought to have been in charge of developing the explosive. By 1978 the first quantity of highly enriched uranium was produced at the Y-Plant at Valindaba, next to the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre, 19 km (12 miles) west of Pretoria. The enrichment method used was an “aerodynamic” process, developed by South African scientists, in which a mixture of uranium hexafluoride and hydrogen gas is compressed and injected at high speeds into tubes that are spun to separate the isotopes.

A fission gun-assembly design, similar to the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was chosen. It has been estimated that the South African version contained 55 kg (121 pounds) of highly enriched uranium and had a yield of 10 to 18 kilotons. In 1985 South Africa decided to build seven weapons. Six were completed, and the seventh was partially built by November 1989, when the government ceased production. The nuclear and nonnuclear components were stored separately. The two subcritical pieces of highly enriched uranium for each weapon were kept in vaults at the Kentron Circle (later renamed Advena) facility, about 16 km (10 miles) east of Pelindaba, where they had been fabricated. When fully assembled, the weapon weighed about one ton, was 1.8 metres (6 feet) long and 63.5 cm (25 inches) in diameter, and could have been deliverable by a modified Buccaneer bomber. However, the bombs were never integrated into the armed forces, and no offensive attack plans were ever drawn up for their use.

The government decision to disarm was made in November 1989, and over the next 18 months the devices were dismantled, the uranium was made unsuitable for weapon use, the components and technical documents were destroyed, and the Y-Plant was decommissioned. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspected South Africa’s facilities beginning in November 1991, and it eventually concluded that the weapons program had been terminated and the devices dismantled.

According to South African officials, the weapons were never meant to be used militarily. Rather, they were intended to force Western governments, particularly the United States, to come to South Africa’s aid if it were ever threatened. The plan was for South Africa first to inform the West covertly that it had the bomb. If that failed, South Africa would either publicly declare it had a nuclear arsenal or detonate a nuclear bomb in a deep shaft at the Vastrap test site in the Kalahari to demonstrate the fact.

North Korea

Little authoritative information has been made available about the North Korean nuclear program. Western intelligence agencies and scholars provide most of what is known. The threat of a nuclear attack by the United States both during and after the Korean War may have spurred North Korea’s Kim Il-sung to launch a nuclear weapons program of his own, which began with help from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. China provided various kinds of support over the next two decades, and Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan apparently provided uranium enrichment equipment and warhead designs.

The centre of North Korea’s nuclear program is at Yŏngbyŏn, about 100 km (60 miles) north of the capital of P’yŏngyang. Its major facilities include a reactor that became operational in 1986, a reprocessing plant, and a fuel fabrication plant. The 5-megawatt reactor is capable of producing about 6 kg (13 pounds) of plutonium per year. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded in the early 1990s that North Korea had effectively joined the other nuclear powers by building one or possibly two weapons from plutonium that had been produced prior to 1992.

From 1994 to 2002, as a result of an agreement with the United States, the North Korean nuclear program was effectively frozen, as its nuclear reactor was shut down. In October 2002 the United States accused North Korea of having resumed its military nuclear program, and in response P’yŏngyang announced that it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty—the only country ever to do so. North Korea’s reactor was restarted, and more plutonium was extracted. Estimates vary on how much plutonium was subsequently separated and how many bombs were made from it. One assessment calculated that some 28 to 50 kg (62 to 110 pounds) of plutonium were produced for weapon use. Assuming each weapon contained 4 to 5 kg (9 to 11 pounds), this would be enough for 5 to 12 weapons. Much depended on the technical capability of North Korean designers and the desired yield of the weapons.

On Oct. 9, 2006, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test in its northeastern Hamgyŏng Mountains. Western experts estimated the yield as approximately one kiloton, much lower than the initial tests of the other nuclear powers. Chinese officials said that P’yŏngyang informed them in advance that they planned for a test of four kilotons. Over the following year, international pressure and concentrated diplomacy by the United States and other countries in the region attempted to halt North Korea’s nuclear program.

Other countries

In the decades following 1945, several countries initiated nuclear research and development programs but for one reason or another decided not to proceed to the next stage and produce actual weapons. For example, Sweden had a vigorous nuclear weapons research program for 20 years, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, before the government decided not to go forward. Switzerland too examined the possibility but did not proceed very far. Even today several technologically advanced countries, such as Japan and Germany, are sometimes referred to as virtual nuclear countries because they could fabricate a weapon fairly quickly with their technical knowledge and domestic stocks of separated plutonium.

Several other countries have had fledging nuclear weapons programs that were abandoned through outside pressure, rapprochement with an adversary, or unilateral decisions not to acquire a nuclear capability. Representative of this category are Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Libya, and Iraq. Iran meanwhile has acquired the means to produce enriched uranium despite concerns expressed by the IAEA and the United Nations Security Council that this material may be used to produce nuclear weapons. The programs of these countries are described in turn below.

Taiwan

The purpose and scale of Taiwan’s program remains unclear, though a few details have emerged. After China’s 1964 nuclear test, Taiwan launched a program to produce weapon-grade nuclear material—purchasing a small heavy water research reactor from Canada and various facilities from other countries. By the mid-1970s the United States and the IAEA began to apply pressure on Taiwan to abandon its program, and Taiwan eventually acceded.

Argentina and Brazil

Argentina and Brazil were engaged in competing programs to develop nuclear weapons, mostly under their respective military regimes, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The competition ended in the early 1990s as both countries canceled their programs, agreed to inspections, and signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

Libya

Beginning in the early 1980s, Libya undertook a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of its commitments to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Libya’s program accelerated after 2000, when Libya began to import parts for 10,000 centrifuges in order to enrich uranium—though few machines were ever assembled or made operational. In October 2003 the U.S. Navy intercepted and diverted a German freighter bound for Tripoli that was carrying thousands of centrifuge components, which had originated in Abdul Qadeer Khan’s black market network. In December 2003 Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi publicly stated that all programs for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would be terminated and that inspectors would be allowed to confirm their elimination. Libyan officials also admitted that they had obtained blueprints for a nuclear warhead design from Khan, though the warhead would have been too large to fit on a Libyan missile. Experts who analyzed the Libyan program concluded that it was in its early stages, not well organized, understaffed, incomplete, and many years away from building an atomic bomb.

Iraq

Though a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, Iraq began a secret nuclear weapons program in the 1970s, using the claim of civilian applications as a cover. In 1976 France agreed to sell Iraq a research reactor (called Osirak or Tammuz-1) that used weapon-grade uranium as the fuel. Iraq imported hundreds of tons of various forms of uranium from Portugal, Niger, and Brazil, sent numerous technicians abroad for training, and in 1979 contracted to purchase a plutonium separation facility from Italy. Iraq’s program was dealt a setback when Israeli aircraft bombed the Osirak reactor on June 7, 1981, demolishing the reactor’s core. Over the next decade, several methods of enriching uranium were undertaken by Iraq, but the country’s ambitious plans were never realized, and by the end of the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) only a few grams of weapon-grade nuclear material had been produced. UN inspectors uncovered a sizable Iraqi clandestine biological weapons program after Pres. Ṣaddām Ḥussein’s son-in-law, Ḥussein Kāmil, who headed the program, defected in August 1995. In 1998 Ṣaddām forced the UN inspectors out, leading to growing suspicions that WMD programs were once again being pursued. The inspectors returned in November 2002 but did not find any evidence of resuscitated programs before the beginning of the Iraq War on March 20, 2003. No WMD were discovered following American occupation of Iraq.

Iran

In the late 1970s the United States obtained intelligence indicating that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi had established a clandestine nuclear weapons program, though Iran had signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1968. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) that followed interrupted this program, but by the late 1980s new efforts were under way, especially with the assistance of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold Iran gas centrifuge technology and provided training to Iranian scientists and engineers. The Iranians also began secretly to construct a number of nuclear facilities in violation of their safeguards agreements with the IAEA. In 2002 an Iranian opposition group in Paris revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment facility at Naṭanz and a heavy water plant at Arāk, spurring the IAEA to take action.

Iran had contracted with Russia in 1995 to finish a nuclear power plant begun by West Germany in the mid-1970s at Būshehr, raising international concerns that it could be used as part of a weapons program. Beginning in February 2003, IAEA inspectors made many visits to suspected facilities and raised questions about their purpose, and in September 2005 the IAEA’s Governing Board found Iran in noncompliance with its safeguards obligations. Iran claimed that it was pursuing nuclear technologies for peaceful civilian purposes, which are legal under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, but many believed that Iran was creating a nuclear infrastructure in order eventually to build a nuclear weapon.

By 2005 the reactor at Būshehr was essentially complete, but Russia prolonged negotiations over supplying the fuel and returning the spent fuel to Russia. . Aside from the fresh reactor fuel supplied by Russia, by 2008 Iran had produced enough low-enrichment uranium (less than 5 percent uranium-235) at its enrichment facility to fuel a single implosion-type fission weapon—if, that is, the low-enriched uranium were further enriched to about 90 percent uranium-235. However, enrichment beyond 5 percent uranium-235 would place Iran in violation of its safeguards obligations, and the enrichment process would likely be detected by the IAEA’s inspectors before the highly enriched uranium could be assembled into a deliverable nuclear weapon. Official and expert opinions vary on when Iran might have the capability of building a nuclear bomb if it should choose to do so, with estimates ranging from 2009 to 2015.